And calm... The conversations certainly are important. Not I was advocating staying home every day, just 2-3 days per week. I completely agree that you need to see people face to face and that it is impossible to keep track...

Making use of all that shiny modern telecoms infrastructure and not insisting that people go to an office every day would make a bigger difference. A laptop and home internet 3-4 days per week can easily cut your average office...

You don't even need to collapse the hierachy down to p=np. Finding an efficient classical algorithm to simulate quantum gates would do it. On balance I think the long term gains from that would offset the short term wailing and...

Bitcoin was designed as a long term marketing strategy for a fake quantum computing company. The idea was that bitcoin would be moderately popular, then they could sell their coins and use the publicity to sucker investors into buying all...

You have my sympathies. Immersion heaters are the devils work. For the record "modern" gas combi boilers are pretty rubbish for providing washbaisin or even kitchen sink sized amounts of water too. At least in my house where the volume...

Personally I am neutral about ebooks. I prefer old fashioned physical media that doesn't need batteries for reference books and things liable to be reread. More disposable fluff fiction and travel reading that won't earn shelf space can go on...

Judging by the comments around here SF fans are split between people who are already booking their first upload and those who think any technology newer than vacuum tubes is sorcery. Or maybe they are just the ones who show...

- You have to remember that Peter Erwin is still employed and must defend the current "Gravity only cosmology" or risk losing his job. Nonsense. I know of a physics* lecturer in a leading british university who is working on...

Assuming you can wrangle small black holes at all then replacing them would not be necessary. Make them large enough that the hawking radiation is manageable and feed them matter at a rate that balances hawking losses. At this level...

But if you work on speculative ideas just beyond the realm of what can be measured you can keep writing papers until you retire without ever having to be wrong. If a group of you do it then everyones citation...

Without FTL the concept of space battles doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Genocidal bushwhacking with dense, black projectiles and mutually assured destruction seem more likely. They could be on their way already for all we know. It's...

The original series was, the remake took the genocide premise and went in a very different direction. It was a bit weird, in that the "aircraft carrier in space" ane "enemy within" elements were mostly played straight early on but...

School almost convinced me I hated being active, when I actually only hated all the sports they forced me to do. Top tip to educators: Someone who develops hand eye coordination late is not going to grow up loving ball...

A question that enthusiasts rarely bother to answer is: Assuming that mind uploading is possible, what do you have to offer that makes it worth peoples while to expend the resources to keep you running? I remember reading one short...

Ignoring my skepticism about the practicality of neutrino comms, dark matter experiments that notice anomalies have been cautious since the BICEP 2 debacle. I would expect survivors would to report tentative results somewhere between between 6 months and 2 years...

Comment Threads

I think most leaders are bonkers by the time they arrive. Possible exceptions are the people who are unexpectedly shoved onto the stage and don't immediately die: Truman, Claudius, etc. Even they don't take that long adapting to the craziness inherent in "the system". There's an old saying: “You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.”...

I can only speculate on the rarity of hybrid minivans in the US market, possibly cost of certification. Ford has displayed hybrid minivan prototypes, I expect one for sale soon, possibly Honda & Toyota are waiting until they can release one with more electric range, rather than adapting a small battery into an existing design....

NO, I have a *system* that will heat 200 liters of water every MONTH. OK, when you said "Water cooled PV panels that make both electricity AND pre-heat the hot water tank" I thought you meant house-scale or industrial-scale, not the little ones on a solar powered toy. Sorry for the confusion....

Just because you can't make a profit from it doesn't mean something is not worth doing. Of course not. Elon Musk thought it was worth launching a car into space, for example, and Rod Stewart builds model train dioramas. I have hobbies too, and they're only useful as a way of keeping me off the streets. When I thought your goal was "use renewable energy more effectively" I found your suggestion confusing. But in the context of, say, keeping a fish tank warm by building a thing it makes more sense. Presumably you have fish and like building things. It's...

The biggest Toyota Hybrids are the Rav-4 and the Highlander... big SUVs at the most. They did have a hybrid version of the Sienna, but only in Japan. Honda and Nissan don't have much either. I wonder if there are scaling problems? Chrysler has a minivan, but it's an American car. I don't know how good the build quality is....